My First New York (5 page)

singer
arrived: 1963

I
was twenty-three and just out of the hospital in Colorado, where I'd been recovering from TB for five months. I don't know how I got it—probably from working too hard, running from one club to another. I left the hospital to go to Washington and sing for President Kennedy at the B'nai B'rith celebration, and then it was straight to New York.

My apartment was on West Tenth and Hudson—a one-minute walk to the Gaslight, the Bitter End, and the Village Gate. I immediately rented a grand piano, and my ex-husband sent me my skis, clothes, and some of our wedding china. The piano was the main attraction, of course. I didn't have a lot of work right away, so I would go to the antique shops. I found a fantastic mirror that I spent weeks refinishing, and a $35 set of drawers with a beautiful marble top that I still own.

The Village was like a small town. Izzy Young's Folklore Center was the place to buy finger picks and copies of
Sing Out!
, and to find out where everyone was playing. My five-year-old son was in town a lot, and he loved music, so we'd go to Washington Square Park. I didn't like carrying my guitar around much, but I'd usually find a banjo or guitar player there and sing with them. I was about a third of the way to being famous, so most of them didn't know who I was.

Those days I wore long, dangly silver earrings, high-heeled boots, and a lot of leather. I bought my clothes from shops in the Village: a wraparound denim skirt, long flowered dresses, Romanian blouses
tied in the front, Mexican wedding dresses. I'd start my days with a lot of coffee and a meeting with my manager or with the people at Elektra. For lunch I'd go to the Kettle of Fish with Walter Raim, who had produced my second album, and we'd have a big shrimp salad and maybe some iced tea (I wasn't yet drinking during the day). At night, I'd get together with friends—Lily Tomlin and Jane Wagner, Leonard Cohen and Joan Baez—and we'd make dinner, drink wine, and play music, or Art D'Lugoff would let us in to the Village Gate.

My most vivid memory of that time was on the twelfth of April, when I went to see a Dylan concert at Town Hall. I had seen him live before, but he was schlubby and had sung nothing but Woody Guthrie. In person he was shy and brainy. But his first solo concert—that one blew me away. After that show, I went backstage to hang out with him and Jac Holzman. I told him I wanted to do “Masters of War” on my next album.

I was working like a tiger to grow my career. (I was becoming Judy Collins, and that was quite an effort.) But I was miserable. Even though it was thrilling
to be doing what I was doing, I had depression and didn't know what was the matter. I drank too much, but everyone in that milieu drank too much. One day I called a doctor and said I thought I was being poisoned; that was my default opinion when I got depressed. He put me on Miltown, and of course within two months of getting to New York I was in therapy.

actor
arrived: 1963

G
rowing up in Asbury Park, New Jersey, I always wanted a New York license plate. It was one of those things that felt so cool. Our grandmother lived in Flatbush, and we'd visit her every weekend, driving up through Staten Island and over the ferry. I remember the really good salted pretzels, and the little wax cups of Medix orange juice. Sometimes we'd go to
Ferrara's down in Little Italy and buy a whole bunch of Italian cake.

I didn't move to New York until I was nineteen and commuting to the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. The drive got to be too much, so I decided to bite the bullet and stay with my aunt. Every day I would catch a couple of buses and get to the Nostrand Avenue subway stop, trying with all my might to get past the doughnut shops. They had these cinnamon doughnuts, and they used to blow the smell out onto the station. It was amazing. But you know, we all have hero's journeys in life. One of mine was getting by the doughnuts.

I was a hippie kid, with a little bit of beatnik in me, too. I was a vegetarian with long hair. I did yoga. I was always wearing T-shirts and sweatshirts. I just wanted to dig in and become part of the cement and the bricks and the buildings of the city. I had a particular affinity for the Bowery, which was lined with rows of people sleeping on the streets. The grittiness of the city wasn't frightening. I thought it was really cool.

Someone did try to mug me once at Fourth Street and Sixth Avenue, but it didn't work. I intellectualized the situation. He had a kitchen knife, and I started
talking: “I realize that you have no money, and maybe your tampering with drugs forced you into this situation, and I have no money to speak of either because I'm working as an actor. Why would you want to stick this big knife in my throat? With all due respect, we're all in it together. I mean, I have empathy for you, you have empathy for me….” By the time I stopped blabbing we were at Sheridan Square, with people selling papers and cops getting coffee. He put the knife back in his pants and went his way.

That first summer, I did a play at the Eugene O'Neill Theater in Connecticut, where I met Michael Douglas. We came back to New York, and I immediately moved into his apartment on West Eighty-ninth Street. It was one big room, and I slept on the floor. But you know, we were hippies; we didn't even think about going to sleep. It was called
crashing
. We'd hang out with John Guare and with John Noonan and a couple of guys who weren't named John. Most of the experiences that Michael and I had we've never been able to talk about. It's terrible! But I had a rule: If he was coming home with a girl, he had to bring another one too, or he wasn't allowed in.

model and actress
arrived: 1964

I
came to New York for two things: to get to Africa and to find LSD. In those days it was legal. You could get it from this Swiss chemical company, and I met six guys who were very willing to give it to me. But I didn't like any of them enough to accept, so it took me a few months. As for Africa, I was supposed to meet a friend in New York, and we were going to take
a tramp steamer to Tangier. It was going to cost $140. Once I got there, my plan was to take a bus for ten cents to the outskirts of town and see elephants and rhinoceroses and giraffes. I was as ignorant as a telephone pole.

In any case, the friend didn't show up. I don't think I ever found out what happened to her. I waited for two hours at Idlewild and then took a bus to the Port Authority. I was going through the bus terminal, and I was twenty-one and these very strangely dressed young black guys were following me and saying these weird things. And I thought, Uh-oh. I didn't realize they were pimps, but I knew it was bad. So I panicked and got into a cab. When the cabbie asked me where to go, I didn't know. Then I remembered Tiffany's. I'd heard of Tiffany's. And I knew the corner of Fifty-seventh and Fifth. So I said, “Fifty-seventh and Fifth! Tiffany's!”

It was very early Sunday, and when I got out, New York was deserted. No one anywhere. I had to figure out who I knew and get to a phone. I started bawling as I was walking down the street. Everything I'd ever owned—old college test papers, sneakers from high school—was in these two suitcases. And I couldn't
walk with them. I'd bring one bag about six feet up, and then I'd go back and get the other bag and bring it six feet up. Humping these suitcases down Fifth Avenue. And then I got to a phone booth, this box of glass and metal, and I think I felt protected. I just sat there for a while and cried and tried to figure it out. And then I remembered another friend from New Orleans who was supposed to be in New York. She told me to come right over.

She had this wonderful boyfriend from Brooklyn who said, “Well, you're going to have to get a job.” It made sense; I was going to Africa! There was an ad in the
New York Times
that said, “Wanted: High-fashion model for Christian Dior. Must have experience.” He said, “This! You could do this!” And I said, “No, no. I've never been a model.” And he looked dead straight at me and said, “Of. Course. You. Have.” So I was getting all kinds of lessons in New Yorkese and survival, the very morning I got in.

artist
arrived: 1967

I
paid $150 a month for a raw loft on Greene Street, and all my friends who were already living here laughed, thinking it was outrageous to pay that much. The loft had no heat. I painted for an entire year with gloves on and just my trigger finger sticking out to the button on the airbrush. Literally, the coffee would
freeze in its mug; the toilet would freeze overnight. We slept under a pile of blankets.

SoHo was rats and rags and garbage trucks: there were occasional wars between one Mafia-owned waste-management company and another, during which one would burn the other's trucks. There might have been twenty artists—or people of any kind—living between Houston and Canal; you could have shot a cannon down Greene Street and never hit anybody. But we all lived within a few blocks of each other: Brice Marden, Richard Serra, Nancy Graves, Phil Glass. We were in someone's loft every night, either listening to a composer like Steve Reich or watching dancers like Yvonne Rainer and Trisha Brown. A lot of us helped Richard make his lead prop pieces, because he needed muscle and brawn to roll the lead and stack it up. Phil was his only paid assistant, and the rest of us were this group of writers, filmmakers, even Spalding Gray. After work we'd go over to this cafeteria in what is now the Odeon, and we'd sit around and dream up ideas on the back of napkins.

One of my classmates at Yale had become a dean at the School of Visual Arts, and he hired a bunch of us to teach. SVA was crazy. The director, Silas Rhodes,
had a policy of never failing students so they wouldn't be drafted. This meant that no student could ever be too bad or use too many drugs, so it was like teaching in Bangladesh or something—burned-out carcasses of speed freaks littered the hallways. But then the faculty was so busy revolting that there was little differentiation between them and the students. It was all revolt, all the time.

We didn't feel we had anything much to teach, anyway. But I do remember a course called Survival. If you wanted to live in a loft, you had to learn how to put up your own drywall, insulate the ceiling, and figure out some way to heat it. So one week we brought in a plumber, the next week an electrician. They'd teach real bare-bones stuff, but it took the scariness out of living in New York.

Sometimes we'd go to the Exploding Plastic Inevitable, Andy Warhol's nightclub extravaganza that he ran on St. Marks Place. But the main thing was the watering holes, chief among them Mickey Ruskin's Max's Kansas City. Andy and his entourage would be in the back room with Rauschenberg and his entourage, and we younger artists like Robert Smithson and Dorothea Rockburne and Mel Bochner would
tend to be in booths up front. There would be huge fights. At the time, there were only about fourteen contemporary art galleries, so you could start a Saturday at Eighty-sixth Street and work your way down Madison to see every piece of contemporary art being shown in New York. Usually someone would have done that and then come in Max's and say, “I just saw so-and-so's show and it's great,” and then everyone would put him on the spot to explain why it was great, and they'd become more and more aggressive, and sometimes they would freak out, throw a drink, and walk out.

There was music upstairs—Janis Joplin would be leaning up against the jukebox with a bottle of Southern Comfort, singing along with Edith Piaf with tears streaming down her cheeks. Mickey would trade artists' work for a tab, so there was a big John Chamberlain sculpture in the front—a huge galvanized piece that was the coatrack for the whole place. Along one wall was a really beautiful Donald Judd, and in the corner in the back room was a red Dan Flavin that put a particularly eerie hue on top of all the pale Warhol Superstars.

writer
arrived: 1968

S
ummer of '68. Europe's gone mad. From April through July, riots break all over Germany, then France and Italy. The Russians invade Czechoslovakia. That same August, as I'm preparing to step on American soil for the first time, violent images from the Chicago Democratic National Convention tell me that what I've just seen in Europe awaits me in the States.
I am filled with strange misgivings and fears. Earlier in spring Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. were assassinated, the War in Vietnam still rages, Columbia students have just rioted, and Richard Nixon will most likely become president. The world is not a good place. I am almost eighteen. I could be drafted within months of landing in the United States.

In September, my uncle picks me up at JFK and says, “Welcome home.” This, my home? I ask myself with dismay and disbelief as we zip through the huge airport. Unlike those who arrived in America a century ago, there is no time for gaping starry-eyed at the Statue of Liberty from aboard the packed decks of giant ocean liners; there is no Statue of Liberty at JFK, no Ellis Island to be quarantined in as you learn to close the ledger on the Old World and take baby steps into the new. I want to be locked in a time capsule and be shielded from the present.

Through the smog, the looming silhouette of Manhattan's skyscrapers flutters ominously, so distant, so unreal, just as I want it to be. I want everything to be unreal, I am not here, I am not ready to be here. Projects, trellised bridges, ugly bridges, fire escapes everywhere as we speed up the highway to the Bronx.
My uncle takes a few minutes to show me the Grand Concourse, where he used to live, the boulevard of dreams. What grandeur, he says as he races up the Concourse. What drab buildings, I think. I am definitely not here.

In the home where my aunt and he have put me up, I'm surrounded by strange scents—a blend of Pine-Sol, Dial soap, cedar, mothballs, and lemon Pledge to buff the wood paneling downstairs. At night, the faux wood creaks, my clothes smell of cedar and of wood polish; then to offset the scent of faux pine and faux lemon, I find myself smelling of Dial soap. I don't want to smell of Dial soap. Everything is faux: the smell of bread; the juices; even the weather these days is faux summer, called Indian summer. In all this, the one thing I recognize and find comfort in is a song that had already come out in Europe and is on radio stations everywhere in New York: “Hey Jude.” In the wood-paneled basement, which is temporarily my room, “Hey Jude” takes me back to happier days in Rome, when on long walks alone I'd try to imagine the unimaginable as I waited for a visa I kept hoping might never come.

When the visa finally does arrive, it is already too
late for college. My uncle says he'll fix this,
You watch
. He'll sweet-talk the woman at the registrar's office and get me to register for courses, even if I'm three weeks late,
You watch
. He drives me to Lehman College, known at the time as Hunter College, in the Bronx. The lady at the registrar, who adamantly refuses to let me register so late, says I'll just have to wait till the spring term. Meanwhile, what are your plans? she asks. I mutter something tame and docile about plans I don't have. Yes, intervenes my uncle, but can't she make an exception? None whatsoever. What will he do for five months, twiddle his thumbs? She ignores the question.

Did you see how ugly she is? says my uncle as soon as we leave her office. There is something refreshing and almost reassuringly Old World in this sort of remark; it brings admissions officers, bureaucrats, universities, my future career, my entire life in America, down to a plain, petty, ordinary, human scale. As we walk out of the building, I spot about two hundred students lounging about on the grass. I know I'll never be one of them, long-haired hippies with guitars, their books and notebooks littered all over, many of the men shirtless, the women barefoot, some necking. I
am wearing flannel pants, a buttoned shirt, a necktie, and polished brown shoes—to make a good impression, my uncle had said. I look ridiculous. You should have said something, he says as he steps into the car. He's right; I should have said something. This is America, we speak up here.

My uncle is visibly upset. He is a busy-busy man. I had better get busy too and find myself a job. No twiddling thumbs, young man. A few days later he puts me on the subway at Gun Hill Road in the Bronx and tells me to change at Fifty-ninth Street and get off at Fifty-first Street. There I'll find an employment agency on Lexington Avenue; they'll help me land a job. It's ten o'clock when I arrive at the agency. By lunchtime, I have already been to an interview, where I'm told that I shouldn't be applying for a mailroom position. Several dimes and many phone calls later, I manage to arrange for an interview at four o'clock. Meanwhile I've walked all around Midtown Manhattan. I've seen Park Avenue. Fifth Avenue too, caught a glimpse of the Empire State Building. I've had lunch at a place called Chock Full o'Nuts. I've even found time to walk into the Rizzoli bookshop because I am already homesick.

By late afternoon, though, I am lucky, and I've landed a job at Lincoln Center at a salary of $75 a week. I start in a few days. This is totally new. I've never earned money before. I'm struggling to contain the strange and unexpected feeling of lightness and bliss that suddenly takes hold of me. On Broadway, I feel as though I've been let into something welcoming, huge, munificent. Even the scowling statue of Columbus, which turned its back to me as soon as I'd seen it, looks different now, wants to know me better, wishes me well—So you're one of us now! My aunt and uncle are happy for me. “Hop on the train and come home!” I don't want to tell her that I want to hang out awhile—feel the city, walk the city, open up to a city I've been trying my best to stave off.

I decide not to head back to the East Side but to walk up Broadway. It's five in the afternoon, and the cast of light on this late Indian summer afternoon glistens on the side of buildings facing west. This, I can tell by staring at my subway map, is Central Park. So this must be Broadway. And then, for the first time, I finally glimpse the whole of Lincoln Center, majestic, posh, irreducibly modern. I have never before, even in Europe, seen so immense an institution devoted to
one thing only: Art. And I'm going to be its youngest mail boy, I think, chuckling to myself. When I scan the billboards, Art, it seems, is more at home here than it has been anywhere else in the world. I don't want to believe this, or not quite yet, but I already feel that there is as much old stuff here as there is new. The blending of the two enthralls me.

Beyond Lincoln Center lies the Seventy-second Street station, where I'm to take the subway to the Bronx. I have time still. Once on Seventy-second Street, I decide that this walk is long overdue and that rather than disturb the mood I'm in, I'll walk up to the Seventy-ninth local station. This is the first time I'm alone in the New World, and I love the New World, its new buildings, its old buildings, its fruit vendors, its large banks, its tiny parks where old folk sit on long benches, its buses, its eddy of cabs, its windows that tell me there's a whole way of life behind each one that I wouldn't know the first thing about but am dying to peer into. I can sense this is exactly the New York I'd been dreaming of but was afraid to go looking for because I feared it existed only in Leonard Bernstein and in Billy Wilder's films—not the East Side, not the Bronx, not Queens, but a
narrow strip whose name, as I would find out soon enough, is the Upper West Side.

For the next five months, until the start of college, I take this walk almost every evening, starting on Fifty-ninth Street and going all the way up Broadway to Columbia University, passing by Dante Park, Verdi Square, Straus Park, nodding at one movie theater after the other along the way, thinking of all the films I am craving to see—
2001: A Space Odyssey
,
The Odd Couple
,
Romeo and Juliet
—already sensing that as I walk an improvised ritual blossoms between me and the city, and that this must be the stuff of magic and love.

This is your walk and this is your moment and this is your time capsule, says the city every evening as I leave the mailroom and step outside to find the lights of Lincoln Square. This is the moment when you can take me and mold me and make me in your image, and I'll be what you wish and I'll take after all your wants and whims, I'll woo you if I have to till you get used to me and love me. But after this I'll harden into what you see now and what you want now, and I may never change again. Buildings will come and go, and today's movie theaters will be gone soon enough, you
will grow older too, but come the evening of every day, you'll find me as you find me now, waiting for you to step out into the speckled evening to recall, once again, as ever again, that you and I are of one kind. This is your New York.